The Spring 2021 Manga Guide

Undead Girl Murder Farce

What's It About? 

The end of the 19th century—a vampire's wife is murdered, and the detective known as the "cage user" is called in to solve the crime. But there's more to the detective and the curtained birdcage he carries...after all, when solving a case involving a monster, it might just take one to know one!

Undead Girl Murder Farce is scripted by Yugo Aosaki and drawn by Haruka Tomoyama and Kodansha Comics will release its first volume digitally on June 15.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

If there's one major issue with Undead Girl Murder Farce, it's that I keep reading it as Undead Girl Murder Face. Although, given that said undead girl is actually just a severed head in a cage, that might not actually be as big an issue as it seems. Aya is another detective in the Sherlock Holmes mold, a brilliant deductress of mysteries great and small, but with that one critical issue: she's unable to move about on her own because she doesn't have the legs to do it. So she instead has a faithful maid and an obnoxious guy to carry her from place to place, solving mysteries as she goes to assuage her boredom borne of a thousands years of living.

As you might have guessed, the story takes place in a world where the supernatural exists, and in fact is fairly common. (Not Aya, though – even vampires are shocked by her.) By way of world building, we learn that after the French Revolution of 1789, France granted legal rights to vampires and other demons, provided that they committed themselves to living peacefully alongside humans. Many agreed to the terms, but that didn't stop prejudice against the vampiric, and even though it became illegal in France to hunt law-abiding vampires, vampire hunters still go after them from time to time – even in the late 1890s, when the story takes place. (It's interesting to note that France's situation is implied to be unique in Europe; Germany appears to have no such laws in place.) Misinformation still abounds, and all in all it feels like the author really paid attention to basic human nature and unreasonable biases when coming up with this part of the story.

Aya and her pleasant companions enter the picture when a noble vampire's wife is murdered, apparently by German vampire hunters. Since the police won't touch the case, he sends for private detectives, and Aya's reputed to be the best. This is probably true, but you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell from the mystery portion of the story, because this really isn't a fair play mystery. Instead Aya makes a few observations and keeps most of her deductions to herself, waiting until the family is all gathered to reveal who the killer is. I won't say that the answer is a surprise, but that's not because we can piece together the clues alongside the detective; it's more that the other answers are all just way too obviously being pushed, so the answer has to be the one left over. That doesn't actually take away from the enjoyment of the story, however, which is fairly unusual, at least for me. There's just so much else to pay attention to in the art and the world building that it makes for an interesting read as a whole rather than just a supernatural horror/mystery hybrid. I don't love how busy the art is (although I do like the doll-like qualities Aya has), but the best thing I can say is really that I want to know what happens next. Since that's what a mystery should make you want to know, I'd say this one is off to a pretty good start.